Matthew 1:18-25
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
December 21, 2025
In Indiana a decade ago, a group of spelunkers (i.e., cave explorers) got trapped deep underground by subterranean floods. When they didn’t return up top on schedule, a search and rescue team invaded the pitch-black darkness of that labyrinth of caves and tunnels to find and save them.
As time passed and no means of escape was found, as food and matches dwindled, and as battery-powered flashlights dimmed in the endless night, many of the stranded spelunkers succumbed to despair. They felt sure the cave was a trap about to become their tomb.
But their hearts soared with relief and joy when, at last, rescuers arrived with food, bright lights, warm clothes and ear-to-ear smiles. Those rescuers shared the elation of those who had thought they were doomed. One rescuer, who described the smell of those who’d been cramped together in tight quarters for days in stinky cave gear, said “it was the best thing I’d ever inhaled!”
Once the rescuers had readied the spelunkers to go, they led them on a four-hour trek to the top – wading through cold and murky water, scrambling over sharp rocks and squeezing through tight tunnels.
When the spelunkers emerged out onto the earth’s surface, wild cheers and hugs welcomed them. They blinked in astonishment at their resurrection and just stood there taking it all in: the bright light, the aroma of fried chicken, the warmth of thick blankets and the cheeriness of a blazing fire.
One of the saved spelunkers is a Christian named Linda Demarest. She sees in her rescue from death an analogy with what God was up to in sending His Son to descend into the darkness of our sin-benighted world. Jesus invaded what might well have been our tomb, that He might rescue us and bring us up into the light of life.
Linda reflected that when Jesus got right there with us in our dark, sin-sick predicament, there was a stink worse than that in the cave in which she’d almost died. Yet, Jesus stayed then, and stays now, in the stench as long as needed to ready folks to take the long tough trek to the top. He leads those who follow Him to a higher place of restoration and renewal, where there’s a family called the church that receives such as us with shouts of joy, warms us up around the fire of Christ’s love, feeds us the Spirit’s fried chicken, and makes us secure and strong enough to do for others what was done for us.
But all the bear hugs, crackling fires and hot cocoa we experience at church only suggest a greater joy in a greater world to come! Even church at its loving best is but a faint hint of something better still.
The story of Christmas is the story of God’s intervention when we were doomed and invasion of its darkness to deliver us into the clean fresh air of His grace. Like the members of that rescue team, Jesus sacrificed ease and safety to come for us. Unlike them, He came knowing it would cost Him His life.
I fear we sanitize and romanticize the first Christmas. Yes, there was a darling baby and glorious angels. But it was also scary, cold, dark, brutal.
To be born in Bethlehem, the Son of God had to cross waters deeper, murkier and colder than Linda’s rescuers and descend deeper into the pitch-black darkness than they. He also did something they didn’t have to: suffer hell, that we might not.
And it was hard for Mary and Joseph as well. Given that her pregnancy looked to all the world like the result of a slutty slip-up by an engaged teenage girl, Mary endured shaming and vicious gossiping; and Joseph, insulting jokes and demeaning snickers behind his back. Given that those two inexperienced parents were on their own in a cold, dark barn, stinking with animal smells, Mary delivered her first baby without the help of a mother or a midwife, and with only a clueless Joseph assisting in the bewildering and bloody process.
That holy night, it must have been for them terribly difficult, despite angelic visitations, to believe they’d really encountered messengers from God and that their humiliation and hardship was part of the working out of God’s wonderful plan to intervene for humanity and to invade our bleak world to offer us rescue and life itself. But for Mary and Joseph, the birth of Jesus was neither pretty nor pleasant.
The Christmas before last, Carrie McKean posted an online reflection for Christianity Today. She wrote, “When I think about the night of Jesus’ birth, the first picture that comes to mind is straight from my childhood.” As an enchanted little girl, she said, she’d peer long and hard upon a snow globe manger scene. In it, she wrote, “snow falls softly, blanketing the hillside in a carpet of quiet. All is calm. All is bright. Give it a good shake, the snow gently swirls, and then settles once more over the pristine couple and the silent baby.”
That serene image was dislodged by a daily experience she and her husband had when they served a Christian orphanage in a dusty Chinese village. Each day they walked to work past a shepherd’s stable, one you smelled before you saw it. Fetid and filthy sheep crowded it full. In the summer, flies buzzed everywhere; in the winter, brown and yellow sludge froze solid.
Carrie writes, “At Christmas I used to picture my Savior born amid fresh, sweet hay in an inexplicably warm and comfortable shelter. The snow globe in my mind was how I wanted to imagine the birth of Jesus. But the stable I walked past told the truth. Stables smell like sheep. I wanted to throw my snow globe at a brick wall. That picture of a clean Nativity was plastic, fraudulent and fake…I’d cheapened and tamed the gospel. And my own faith felt fake and plastic…The world needs a God-become-flesh in circumstances far messier than that of a perfect little snow globe.”
At Christmas God intervened and invaded our fetid and filthy world, a stinky mess full of physical disease and mental illness, injustice and oppression, fear and betrayal, heartache and tragedy. In the Person of Jesus, God joined the fallen human race; and by His Holy Spirit, He remains as close to each of us as our own breath – that He might lead us forth out of our tomb, giving hope and love to all.
The good news of Christmas is that we don’t have to clean up our stinky mess before God arrives at our side. He’s already there with us, accepting us, yearning to save us, but awaiting our decision whether we’ll trust Him and follow Him on that long, tough trek to the top.
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